Annie Dillard Book Review

”[250]. LWP
“An American Childhood” by Annie Dillard
Book Review
sharonbrowder

To see adolescence through the eyes of one who honestly celebrates it, is to get next to Annie Dillard, as she leads us through her awakening, in “An American Childhood”. Dillard’s first person account draws the reader into her memories filled with the giddy rampages of youth coming awake. Each chapter snatches at the past and sifts out what matters.
Outlined by the detailed scaffolding of place, the reader is left to wander through the halls of memory. There were many visits to the library and fond first knowings of the images of nature that would latter pave the way to her Pulitzer Prize winning book - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. For her the Homewood Library, [81] with its quote, “Free the People” graven across the façade, gave her a card to the nonfiction of her life to be. She consumed nonfiction, with “The Field Book of Ponds and Streams” as her favorite, along with Nicolaides’ “The Natural Way to Draw”. [I felt that I was sitting with her on the cool marbled floors of the library. I too had pulled from books that would lay the groundwork for a life-long love - animals. I spent hours, like Dillard, pouring over volumes of books about dogs and horses. I would bring pencil and paper to log in the titles I investigated and to draw what I saw of the anatomy and outline of type and poses. Dillard says, “…things were interesting as long as you had attention to give them. How long does it take to draw a baseball mitt? As long as you had attention to give it. Not an infinite amount of time, but more time than you first imagined.”[79] I knew exactly and instantly what she meant. As an only child I had the time and the need to know. I gave myself over to all things dog and horse. Then I narrowed than need down to reality, I could own a dog, not a horse. So my focus became dogs. When Dillard writes about “finding books about what one actually did.”[78] igniting her fervor for conscious drawing, I am there with her. I can still remember begging my Big Daddy, to search for a specific book, “Drawing Dogs” for his red-headed granddaughter. No other book would do. He was helpless to find it. So one Saturday, hand in hand we walked downtown, into the bookstore, to the shelf on animals, and to the volume I had fingered so many times, “Drawing Dogs”. I was beaming and tingling with anticipation as he paid the clerk. I knew I would soon be engaged, like Dillard, in “conscious drawing”.[78] I titled this chapter in her life and mine, “Free to the People: Books”. For me it was a gateway memory.]
Dillard’s tone of textual dialogue filled in the lines that made the colorful picture of her real-life characters - her mother and father. When she wrote of her father’s “bar jokes”[51] she wrote the words that defined his character - “…raffish air of a man who was at home anywhere. [How poignant were his ‘you knows’ directed at me: you know how bartenders are; you know how the regulars would all be sitting around. For either I, a nine-year old girl , knew what he was talking about, then, or ever, or nobody did. Only because I read a lot, I often knew.”][51] This inside view of her dad is typical of Dillard’s memories. She idolized her dad and let us in to see what she saw in him. [ I too had a dad who was ‘at home anywhere.’ As a traveling salesman he was the star of his territory. As he made his rounds from town to town, store to store, I saw him joke and cajole his way to sales. I would stand with my fingers curled around the edge of a pharmacy counter, watching and listening, while my dad pitched his wares. He was like a magician, as he pulled words out of his hat. I would see many he approached did not want to buy what he had and yet by the end of the ‘show’, they bought cases. He often told me, “They may hate you, but they will not forget you”. He was the greatest show on earth to me. I wonder now how he talked mother into letting me go. That had to have been his best sales pitch!
Dillard remembers her mother’s “…staccato, stand-up style; if our father could perorate, she could condense. Fellow goes to a psychiatrist. “Your crazy.” “I want a second opinion!” “You’re ugly.” “How do you get an elephant out of the theater? “You can’t; it’s in his blood.” [51-52] Styles, both different, and yet necessary made up Dillard’s own character. They provided the “dazzling verbal surface”[53] through stories, one liners, and “cracks”, which revealed a life lived - the bread and butter of everyday life. From this richness Dillard is nurtured. [ I too, cut my teeth on the humor in life. A quick wit was required at my house. If you did not get the joke, you would find yourself the butt of it. One had to keep up. Like Dillard said of her household - “When my friends visited me, they were well advised to duck.”[55] When I was dating my, later-to-be-husband, he would sit very still, and a little frightened, at the quick and quirky verbal exchange between my parents and I. If he could just be still enough, he may go unnoticed, because if noticed, he would not be allowed to remain on the sidelines, and he knew it. Sometimes I would let him get away with it. In these lessons of the fine art of humor, I was given the gift of seeing the light side of life. Whenever I could not “ make the sale”, I knew I could still laugh. Humor became my safety net. Knowing laughter was there, I could swing freely form one episodic adventure to another, without fear but plenty of drama. Being with me meant you would be offered the same deal, with gusto!]
It is through this vivid lens we look into the childhood of Dillard. Like looking through a family album, Dillard turns the pages, chapter after chapter. I gave titles to all her chapters, so that in re-reading them, I would know what I was in for. There was the chapter in which Dillard told about “living and breathing her history - her Pittsburg history - without knowing or believing any of it.”[74] This was a chapter of discoveries in which she “…walked oblivious through its littered layers”[74] Then in another chapter I called, “Shooting Sparks and Overturning Streetcars” she filled each page with the sensual details of ‘place’. She craftly submersed the reader into the night of the tornado and the power line which had been loosed - “…the fire ball of sparks - the thick twisted steel cable melting a pit for itself in the street”.[101] Then the streetcars “orange, clangy, beloved things - loud, jerky, and old”, sounding their “mournful bells - emitted a long-suffering, monotonous bong…bong…bong… smelling of gasoline, exhaust fumes, trees’ sweetness in the spring and, year round, burnt grit.”[103]. I am there in the telling of it. Dillard is a master story-teller of time and our place in it.
Dillard touched the chords of childhood all the way to her emergence from it. She finally leaves us to wave good-bye as she looks forward to Hollins College to “smooth off her edges”[243] I wish my mother had known to phrase it just that way. Then I maybe I would have not gone so wildly into my freshman year. But like Dillard, “I was in no position to comment.”[244] My mother was desperate to get me out of the house. My stepfather could not tolerate me another day. My mother needed to have her on life…always had…I just had not known how to graciously grant her her wish.
Whether it is college or just the act of any ‘leaving’ at life’s change points, it is the “smoothing off of the rough edges” that is always needed. Dillard had figured out her life as best she could to that moment and now the only thing that was required [as is for all of us] is to take the next step - to do the next thing. Dillard tells it this way:
The setting of our urgent lives is an intricate maze whose blind corridors
we learn one by one - village street, ocean vessel, forested slope -without
remembering how or where they connect in space. You travel, settle
move on, stay put, go. [247] For it is not you or I that is important, neither what sort we might be nor how we came to be each where we are. What is important is anyone’s coming awake and discovering a place, finding in full orbit a spinning globe one can lean over, catch and jump on. What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch - with an electric hiss and cry - this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.[248-249].
Like old friends Dillard and I met again in lines written and pages turned. I am never disappointed [except by her fiction]. I lap up my own memories as I savor hers. When I remember with her, I too “break up through the skin of awareness